Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903) is often considered the founder of sociology (Turner,
1985). He was
born in Derby, England to a family with ties to the Quaker religion (Elliot,
1970). From a
spotty educational background, Spencer studied mathematics and
engineering
before branching out into an examination of a wide variety of topics
and fields
(Carneiro, 1967). A prolific writer, Spencer was "widely read, greatly
admired,
and enormously influential" in his time (Carneiro, 1967, p. ix). Among
the
topics Spencer wrote on in his lifetime were philosophy, sociology,
politics,
ethics, psychology, evolutionary theory, evolutionary epistemology,
biology,
and education. The depth and breadth of Spencer’s accomplishments are
evident
in Carneiro’s (1967) assertion that "no other thinker before or since
has known
so large a proportion of the scientific knowledge of his day" (p. lvii).

Spencer was a
synthetic-systems theorist in that he sought to bring together clusters
of
phenomena around a single central principle (Elliot, 1970). This single
unifying principle was his developmentally oriented pre-Darwinian
evolutionary
(and evolutionary epistemological) theory of an originally homogenous
universe.
For Spencer, the most characteristic feature of life and living matter
was
change (Elliot, 1970).

Weihs (2003) has
examined the influence of Herbert Spencer on George Kelly and his
personal
construct psychology (PCP), noting that Spencer was one of the few
theorists
that Kelly referenced in his published writings (sf. Kelly, 1938, 1979)
and
that several Spenserian influences are discernable within Kelly’s
theorizing
and his personal construct psychology (1955/1991a, 1955/1991b). One of
Kelly’s
(1938) first publications, The assumption
of an originally homogenous universe and some of its statistical
implication,
is pointed to as evidence of the early influence of Spencer on Kelly.
This
paper, which has not been widely considered in the PCP literature, is
discussed
as foundational for Kelly’s later articulation of personal construct
theory.

1) The ontological
position
underlying PCP (substantival neutral monism)
2) The developmental
process
orientation of PCP3) The nature of
constructs and
construing and the relational basis of knowing in PCP4) The structure of
the knower and
the over coming of the realism/idealism dimension in PCP.